"Well, I'll be damned," she said. "And here I thought it was just my dog."

Mack looked disappointed. "You have a dog?"

She shook her head. "Always meant to get one though."

"What are you talking about?" asked Ceese.

"Ceese, you know I see dreams," said Mack. "But I was in her dream."

"Mack, she tried to make me kill you. When you were a baby. The day I found you. She stood there and looked at me and all I wanted to do was kill you."

"I don't know why," said Ceese. "I just know that it took all the strength I had to keep from doing it. And I'm not going to let her kill you now."

Yolanda laughed. "You poor stupid sumbitch, don't you get it yet?"

And with those words, Ceese felt an overwhelming need to turn and point the gun at Mack.

"God help me," whispered Ceese. But he knew with all his heart that he was going to kill Mack.

The person he loved best in all the world. There was his finger on the trigger. The gun pointed straight at Mack's heart.

"God doesn't sweat the small stuff," said Yolanda. "He ain't going to interfere."

"Like you'd know," said Ceese. He was sweating from the effort of not pulling the trigger.

"Ceese, please put down that gun," said Mack.

"Just get out of here," Ceese said between clenched teeth.

"Yolanda," said Mack. "Let go of him. Please."

"He the one with the gun," said Yolanda.

"Titania," said Mack, in a louder voice. "Let him go."

She laughed. "You silly boy, do you think I ever told Will Shakespeare my real name?"

"Mab," said Mack. "Don't do this to him."

"Those things are dangerous. You never know where they'll be pointing when they go off."

"He couldn't have hurt you," said Mack. "Your soul is in a glass jar in a clearing with a panther watching over it."

When the compulsion left Ceese it felt like somebody removed a wall he'd been leaning against.

He stumbled and fell to one knee.

"Bend yo' knee, bow yo' head," said Yolanda. "Tote that barge until yo' dead."

"Mack," whispered Ceese. "I'm sorry."

"Why don't you boys just both sit down on the couch and tell me why you come to see me,

'stead of messing around with guns and shit."

Ceese wanted to plunge out that front door and run home. Or farther. As far as he could go to get the sense of helplessness off him. It clung to him like the stink of skunk.

So he found himself sitting on the shaggy white couch, Mack beside him, his gun still lying on the floor where he'd dropped it.

"I came to warn you," said Mack. "About the neighbors. They plan to use the law on you. Cause your house's deed got a clause in it—"

"Sandy Claus?" asked Yolanda brightly.

"Anyway, that's cause I didn't know who you were. Till you made him point the gun at me. Then I knew."

"You knew less than you think," said Yolanda. She turned to Ceese. "And you, did you come to kill me?"

"I had to know if it was you. The same one."

"You're very strong," said Yolanda. "Twice now, you told me no. Nobody tells me no."

"You can't kill Mack Street," said Ceese.

"Oh, you silly boy," she said. "That was then, this is now. I don't want him dead now. Back then he was still new, just a little wad of evil that my husband squirted out into the world. I was cleaning up. Only you wouldn't do it, Cecil Tucker. And now Mack's grown up into something else. Not just a changeling anymore."

"What's going on?" asked Mack. "Why did I suddenly dream your dream?"

"Because I came into your neighborhood," said Yolanda. "Because I needed a hero. Because nobody around here can wish for anything without it showing up in your dreams."

"Why?"

"Because you the Keeper of Dreams," said Yolanda. "You the Guardian of Wishes. Deep desire, it flows to you. From the moment you popped out of that chimney up there, all the desires around you, they got channeled. They flowed. Right to you, into you, all the power of all the wishing of your whole neighborhood."

"Why?" demanded Mack again.

"So he can worm his way back into the world."

"Who?" asked Ceese.

"My husband," said Yolanda. "The one Will Shakespeare knew as Oberon. Or as he likes to think of himself, the Master of the Universe." She laughed bitterly. "He was cruel, my husband. Not like Puck—not just playful. He was tired of flirting with the human race, he said. He was going to make an end of you and start over with some other kind of creature. One that wouldn't keep fighting him. And I didn't want to. I like humans. And Puck, he doesn't so much like you as like playing with you, but I was able to persuade him to help me."

"Bind the old devil deep inside the earth," said Yolanda. "It took the two of us and a great circle of fairies. We danced on Stonehenge and I called out his name. Because he told me his name, you see."

"What is it?" Mack quickly asked.

"Don't even ask that," said Yolanda. "That's his desire, talking through you. If you say his true name, then he can come out. You're his key, don't you see? All the power of these hundreds of humans is stored up in you, except whatever got bled off to grant their foolish wishes. You've been strong for him, I can see it. You've been keeping it in, not letting any of it out for a long time. But now he wants it out, and he'll have it. If he could get you to say his name, then it would be easier. He could rise up out of the earth himself and no one could stop him then. He'd be like in the ancient days when our kind first came to earth and we all had the shape he's never given up. The first thing he'd do, Mack Street, is swallow you whole, so all that stored-up power was inside him."

"And you're here to stop him?" asked Ceese.

"I'm not here," she said. "That's what Mack understands and you don't. I'm trapped in a jar in a clearing, guarded by a panther, and so is Puck. When we bound Oberon, when he was writhing on the ground in the middle of the henge, when he was sinking down into the earth and it was swallowing him up to hold him captive so he couldn't destroy the human race, he still had his power over Puck.

Once a slave to the king of the fairies, then you're never really free. He can't be trusted, poor Puck, because he's bound by my husband's will. So at the last moment, the old worm tore the light out of us and put it in two jars and hung them like lanterns in a faraway place where he thought we'd never find it."

She sighed. "It took us all these years. Nearly four hundred years. And yet we couldn't get to where he held us captive. Because we could only control bodies in this world. Until you were born, Mack, if you want to call it that, all we could do was petty magicks. Bending humans to our will. Puck didn't mind—it amused him—but I was tired of using castoff bodies and it didn't amuse me to torment the others who still had a firm grip on theirs. We hung around here, but we went our separate ways.

Until we felt it. The surge of power. The darkness like a sudden blast of licorice. Of anise. We knew he had found a passageway that let him push something of himself out into the world. Puck found the way to you first—of course he would, he's still bound to Oberon and such binding works both ways, Oberon can't stir without Puck feeling it. I'm bound, too, but only as a wife. So you were already born when I arrived. Born and put in that shopping bag and taken back to the spout through which the old worm reaches into this world."

"There's no way that Mack is something evil," said Ceese, finally making some sense of what she was saying.

"Is a hammer a good carpenter or a bad one?" asked Yolanda. "The answer is, it's no carpenter at all, and the good or bad of the hammer depends on how the carpenter uses it."

"He's a tool when Oberon says he is. He'll have the use of him when he wants."

"He's the worm in your dream," Mack said. "The slug with wings. The one I fight."